Dissemination of management into politics: Michael Porter and the political uses of management consulting

The article contributes to the literature on management dissemination by looking at how management fashions are diffused into and circulated in politics. The ideas of management have been increasingly disseminated into the realm of politics during recent decades. To illustrate how this takes place, this article examines the spread of Michael Porter’s ideas on national politics. Porter’s work is considered a management fashion that has been skilfully packaged; a new form of the 20th-century tradition of state-led social engineering which takes the form of management fashion-style packaging. For this he is seen as a global guru in national politics, and this development is regarded as a new form of consultocracy in the realm of democracies. In consultocracy, the ideas of management consulting are often adopted into politics as a common justifying rationality of power for the political elites. Thus we call for further research on the underlying dynamics of the power involved as management fashions are disseminated into the realm of politics

Temporal precedence of emotion over attention modulations in the lateral amygdala: Intracranial ERP evidence from a patient with temporal lobe epilepsy

Previous fMRI studies have reported mixed evidence for the influence of selective attention on amygdala responses to emotional stimuli, with some studies showing "automatic" emotional effects to threat-related stimuli without attention (or even without awareness), but other studies showing a gating of amygdala activity by selective attention with no response to unattended stimuli. We recorded intracranial local field potentials from the intact left lateral amygdala in a human patient prior to surgery for epilepsy and tested, with a millisecond time resolution, for neural responses to fearful faces appearing at either task-relevant or task-irrelevant locations. Our results revealed an early emotional effect in the amygdala arising prior to, and independently of, attentional modulation. However, at a later latency, we found a significant modulation of the differential emotional response when attention was directed toward or away from fearful faces. These results suggest separate influences of emotion and attention on amygdala activation and may help reconcile previous discrepancies concerning the relative responsiveness of the human amygdala to emotional and attentional factors

The problem of vocational education and vocational guidance of girls in the mission schools of China

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Theory of knowledge in the philosophies of Henri Bergson and S. Alexander

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1932. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

The role of professional elites in shaping management practice: how the old mentalities condition the adoption of new management ideas

This study explores how the adoption of management ideas is conditioned by wider macro-level mentalities that are not company based but that instead reflect professionally or nationally rooted ways of managing. Drawing from studies on professional mentalities and practices, we study Finnish top executives working in globally operating multinational corporations in the metal and forestry industries, showing how, starting in the 1980s, they adopted new management practices during the rise of globalisation, market liberalisation and post-Fordism. Altogether, a traditional engineering mentality strongly conditioned the dissemination of new management ideas, which needed to adapt with the existing mentality. As a result, we find three ways of management idea dissemination: (a) new ideas had to fit in with the old business elite mentality, (b) new ideas were side-lined and belittled by the old mentality and (c) new ideas were smuggled into management by reframing and widening the old mentality. By extending Guillén’s work on elite mentalities, the study contributes to the research on management ideas by exploring the role of societal macro-level mentalities in management learning, highlighting their role in times of societal transformation

Multilevel and multisite leadership development from a leadership-as-practice perspective : an integrative literature review

http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EJTD-09-2021-0135Purpose This paper reviews what has been written on leadership development from the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) perspective, which views leadership as emerging in everyday activities and interactions of a collective in a specific context. This paper aims to deepen the theoretical understanding of how leadership can be learned and developed from the L-A-P perspective. Design/methodology/approach An integrative literature review was undertaken to review and synthesise what has been written on the topic in journal articles and scholarly books. Findings The importance of the context and the practices that are embedded in it is the most central aspect affecting leadership development from the L-A-P perspective. This places workplace leadership development centre stage, but several papers also showed that leadership programmes have an important role. Not only collective capacity building is emphasised in the papers, but the importance of individual-level leader development is also recognised. Originality/value The contribution of this study is twofold: First, it brings the currently fractured information on L-A-P development together to enhance theory building by providing a synthesis of the literature. Second, a conceptual framework is constructed to show how the L-A-P perspective on leadership development can take both leadership development at the collective and individual levels into account, as well as the learning that takes place either inside or outside the workplace. This study's results and framework show that the development has its own specific purpose and suggested methods in both levels, in both learning sites.Peer reviewe

"It's the work climate that keeps me here": the interplay between the HRM process and emergent factors in the construction of employee experiences

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the interplay between human resource management (HRM) and emergent factors in constructing a strong HRM climate. Specifically, the paper aims to shed light on how employee perceptions of the HRM process and emergent factors together construct a strong HRM climate, i.e. employees' shared perceptions of HRM. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses qualitative interview data (managers and employees) from two organisations operating in Finland. The data are analysed based on a systematic data analysis and gives an illustration of the interplay between high-performance work system and the emergent factors. Findings The findings illustrate the three types of interplay between HPWS and emergent factors – supplementation, substitution and suffocation – that construct employee experience. Originality/value The paper extends earlier discussions on the relationship between HRM and employee experience by empirically examining how the HRM process – together with emergent factors – constructs a strong HRM climate. The present study contributes to further theorising and increasing our understanding of the creation of employee experience.©2022 Emerald Publishing Limited. This manuscript version is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY–NC 4.0) license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Embracing relational vulnerabilities at the top: a study of managerial identity work amidst the insecurities of the self

This study aims to revitalise the concept of relational vulnerability in advancing the theory of managerial identity work. Drawing on 35 semi-structured interviews and 12 podcast interviews with top managers in Finland, we identify two entwined themes through which top managers practise identity work by negotiating their vulnerabilities in the workplace. Our study illustrates the embodied subtlety of relational vulnerabilities in top managers’ identity negotiations by showing they can function as a tool for the managers’ professional development. Our study contributes to the broader discussion on a more humane working life by investigating the ways in which top managers can foster workplaces in which vulnerabilities are used as a starting point for improvement rather than as a tool for disparaging the self and the others. This is an aspect of managerial identity work that deserves to be more profoundly considered in both academic debate and managerial practice

Out‐of‐body experience and autoscopy of neurological origin

During an out‐of‐body experience (OBE), the experient seems to be awake and to see his body and the world from a location outside the physical body. A closely related experience is autoscopy (AS), which is characterized by the experience of seeing one's body in extrapersonal space. Yet, despite great public interest and many case studies, systematic neurological studies of OBE and AS are extremely rare and, to date, no testable neuroscientific theory exists. The present study describes phenomenological, neuropsychological and neuroimaging correlates of OBE and AS in six neurological patients. We provide neurological evidence that both experiences share important central mechanisms. We show that OBE and AS are frequently associated with pathological sensations of position, movement and perceived completeness of one's own body. These include vestibular sensations (such as floating, flying, elevation and rotation), visual body‐part illusions (such as the illusory shortening, transformation or movement of an extremity) and the experience of seeing one's body only partially during an OBE or AS. We also find that the patient's body position prior to the experience influences OBE and AS. Finally, in five patients, brain damage or brain dysfunction is localized to the temporo‐parietal junction (TPJ). These results suggest that the complex experiences of OBE and AS represent paroxysmal disorders of body perception and cognition (or body schema). The processes of body perception and cognition, and the unconscious creation of central representation(s) of one's own body based on proprioceptive, tactile, visual and vestibular information—as well as their integration with sensory information of extrapersonal space—is a prerequisite for rapid and effective action with our surroundings. Based on our findings, we speculate that ambiguous input from these different sensory systems is an important mechanism of OBE and AS, and thus the intriguing experience of seeing one's body in a position that does not coincide with its felt position. We suggest that OBE and AS are related to a failure to integrate proprioceptive, tactile and visual information with respect to one's own body (disintegration in personal space) and by a vestibular dysfunction leading to an additional disintegration between personal (vestibular) space and extrapersonal (visual) space. We argue that both disintegrations (personal; personal-extrapersonal) are necessary for the occurrence of OBE and AS, and that they are due to a paroxysmal cerebral dysfunction of the TPJ in a state of partially and briefly impaired consciousnes

Inferior frontal oscillations reveal visuo-motor matching for actions and speech: evidence from human intracranial recordings.

The neural correspondence between the systems responsible for the execution and recognition of actions has been suggested both in humans and non-human primates. Apart from being a key region of this visuo-motor observation-execution matching (OEM) system, the human inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is also important for speech production. The functional overlap of visuo-motor OEM and speech, together with the phylogenetic history of the IFG as a motor area, has led to the idea that speech function has evolved from pre-existing motor systems and to the hypothesis that an OEM system may exist also for speech. However, visuo-motor OEM and speech OEM have never been compared directly. We used electrocorticography to analyze oscillations recorded from intracranial electrodes in human fronto-parieto-temporal cortex during visuo-motor (executing or visually observing an action) and speech OEM tasks (verbally describing an action using the first or third person pronoun). The results show that neural activity related to visuo-motor OEM is widespread in the frontal, parietal, and temporal regions. Speech OEM also elicited widespread responses partly overlapping with visuo-motor OEM sites (bilaterally), including frontal, parietal, and temporal regions. Interestingly a more focal region, the inferior frontal gyrus (bilaterally), showed both visuo-motor OEM and speech OEM properties independent of orolingual speech-unrelated movements. Building on the methodological advantages in human invasive electrocorticography, the present findings provide highly precise spatial and temporal information to support the existence of a modality-independent action representation system in the human brain that is shared between systems for performing, interpreting and describing actions